May 9 – 12, 2024 | Pérez Art Museum Miami & Koubek Center | Miami, FL ✦
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Personal works made with delicacy and care, the eight films in Sometimes I Imagine You a Little Lonely find their makers reckoning with familial relationships across various histories of migration and diasporic longing.
A Q&A with Jard Lerebours, Elizabeth M. Webb, Sebastian Marcano-Pérez, Raydrick Feliciana, and Nande Walters will follow the screening.
2705 SW 3rd Street, Miami, FL 33135
Dir. Jard Lerebours / 4 minutes / 2022 / Jamaica
Coconut details the director’s trip to his mother’s homeland of Jamaica to bury his grandmother, who was also his caretaker. Made from original Super 8mm footage filmed in Jamaica, as well as found footage, Coconut is a public declaration of love for Gladys Austin.
Dir. Humberto González Bustillo / 14 minutes / 2023 / Venezuela, Argentina
A man speculates about the disappearance of his father, a decorated spy from the 1990s. Gathering relics from their past together, including cherished family photos and encrypted messages hidden in the electronic devices in his surroundings, he will find a way to be reunited with him.
Dir. Génesis Valenzuela / 6 minutes / 2022 / Dominican Republic, Spain
A little girl narrates the myth of original sin: a tear in the garden of Eden. On the other side of the crack, inside a cold bare bedroom, a woman talks to her absent father. On the faded wall, a little piece of the lost paradise.
Dir. Elizabeth M. Webb / 6 minutes / 2022 / United States
Proximity Study (Sight Lines) is an attempt to measure closeness despite temporal distance. The filmmaker’s grandfather (whom she never met), a Black man from the US South, worked as a longshoreman on the Brooklyn waterfront for 37 years. From Governors Island, the filmmaker is able to look directly at his place of work; many years ago, he would have returned her gaze from the other side. “I filmed the Red Hook docks on 16mm film from my perspective on Governors Island, and rowed in the Buttermilk Channel between these two locations. The physical film print trailed behind the boat, tracing our route, recording our sight lines, and reaching to bridge the distance across the channel. Yet, the longer we rowed, the more the water erased the image.” – Elizabeth M. Webb
Dir. Raydrick Feliciana / 19 minutes / 2024 / Portugal
Raiz (“Roots” in Papiamento, the island language of Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire), is created from historical archives and the home movies of an Aruban family, who had to leave the island in search of work in the 1980s. The film is made by their son, raised as a third-culture child, reflecting on the ideas of belonging and home through the long-distance calls with his family.
Dir. Vi Tuong Bui / 7 minutes / 2023 / United States
“Thời Thơ Ấu (Childhood) explores my understanding of my bố mẹ (parents) as people outside of their roles as my parents through looking at how they dream for their late parents and homeland as former refugees of the US War in Vietnam/Vietnam War. What concessions will I need to make to begin to see my parents as expansive individuals? What will I gain from embracing them in their fullness? I collected their dreams, stories, and memories using 16mm and Vietnamese and in my childhood home in Annandale, Virginia and Queens, New York. Vietnamese is the mother tongue of my parents, but English is the language I know myself by. We spoke in Vietnamese for the making of this film, and I slowly translated their words to English.” – Vi Tuong Bui
Dir. Sebastian Marcano-Pérez / 9 minutes / 2022 / United States
Retrospection of a Home (Once Upon a Time…), is a personal essay-film exploration into the collective memory of a Venezuelan family in exile, and the home they had to leave behind years ago.
Dir. Nande Walters / 15 minutes / 2023 / Jamaica, United States
In Soon Come Back, Nande Walters explores memory, or lack thereof, during a trip to visit her grandparents in Kingston, Jamaica. As one of the first US-born children in her family, she reflects on occasional visits to the island through digitizing family photos and videotapes. From her father’s childhood home in Kingston to her grandmother’s childhood home in the mountains of Negril, the filmmaker follows their migrations of leaving home as young adults, using the camera to bridge 22 years of oceanic distance between her, her grandmother, and her ancestral land.
